The applicant has disclosed in pending granted patents U.S. Pat. No. 6,476,863 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,459,495 cards called Artcards in which the information is encoded in black ink on a white background on the reverse face of the printed card, the front surface of the card bearing an image. The data that may be recorded may be the contents of a book recorded in a digital manner with the front face bearing an image equivalent to the dust jacket of the book.
In such prior art, two printheads are required in order to simultaneously print the image on the front of the card and the digital data on the rear of the card. To read the card, the card is passed through an optical scanning means and the fault tolerant encoded data is reconstructed and decoded and provided to a user as an audio or visual output.